Painted in 1826, and presented to the National Gallery in 1837 by an association of gentlemen, who purchased it of the painter's executors. A typical work. John Constable was pleased with his Cornfield. Writing of it to Archdeacon Fisher, he said—"It is not neglected in any part; the trees are more than usually studied, well defined as well as the stems; they are shaken by a pleasant and healthful breeze at noon."
PLATE III.—THE CORNFIELD, OR COUNTRY LANE.
Sir George having placed a small landscape by Gaspar Poussin on his easel, close to a picture he was painting, said, "Now, if I can match these tints I am sure to be right."
"But suppose," replied Constable, "Gaspar could rise from his grave, do you think he would know his own picture in its present state? or if he did, should we not find it difficult to persuade him that somebody had not smeared tar or cart grease over its surface, and then wiped it imperfectly off?"
The fiddle story can be told in fewer words. Sir George having recommended the colour of an old Cremona fiddle for the prevailing tone of everything in Nature, Constable answered by laying an old fiddle on the green lawn before the house.
Sir George Beaumont was one of the last of the servile disciples of Claude Lorraine and the Poussins, who conjured their followers into believing that a landscape must be composed in the grand or "classical" manner, and must conform to certain academic rules. Claude's drawings, preserved in the British Museum, proclaim that he could be as frank, delightful, and impulsive as Constable in his sketches; but when Claude constructed a landscape of ruined temples and fatuous biblical or legendary figures, the inspiration of his drawing usually evaporated. Claude's genius remained, and there are pictures by him, notably "The Enchanted Castle," that in their particular manner have never been surpassed; but alas! it was not the genius that Sir George Beaumont imitated, but Claude's mannerisms and limitations.
The stay-at-home Dutchmen who flooded the seventeenth century with their simple, homely, and often beautiful landscapes had no attraction for grandiose Sir George and his kin. The genius of Watteau which flashed into the eighteenth century, the commanding performances of Richard Wilson and Gainsborough in landscape, had no influence upon the practitioners of the grand manner. And in truth those pioneers suffered for their temerity. Wilson, who never quite cast off the classical mantle, accepted with gratitude, at the height of his fame, the post of librarian to the Royal Academy. Gainsborough would have starved had he been obliged to depend upon landscape painting for a living, and Constable would have been in financial straits had he been obliged to depend for the support of his family entirely upon the sale of his pictures.
Wilson died in 1782, Gainsborough in 1788, and J. R. Cozens, whom Constable described as "the greatest genius who ever touched landscape," in 1799; but the careers of these men cannot be said to have influenced their landscape contemporaries. While Wilson, Gainsborough, and Cozens were still alive, certain boys were growing up in England, who were destined to make the nineteenth century splendid with their landscape performances. What a galaxy of names! Old Crome and James Ward were born in 1769; Turner and Girtin in 1775; Constable in 1776. Cotman saw the light in 1782, the year of Wilson's death; David Cox in 1783; Peter de Wint in 1784, and the short and brilliant life of Bonington began in 1801. But landscape painting was still, and was to remain for long, the Cinderella of the arts. In 1829 Cotman wrote a letter beginning, "My eldest son is following the same miserable profession."